Finding and evaluating someone to provide a professional service can be difficult. Even with the help of the Internet and the numerous websites that list service providers, it is hard for someone to know whom to trust and who is the best match.
This becomes particularly true with respect to high-skill professional services, which are harder to commoditize or specify via a search engine. Some of these providers are service firms and agencies (collections of professionals offering services under one business). However the budget and scope of the services required may be very small and better suited to freelancers. In fact, professional freelancing is a growing trend, which brings its own problems, as the service providers to be found are smaller, have weaker reputations, and less budget to market themselves.
Websites such as upwork.com, thumbtack.com, fiverr.com and freelancer.com provide a means to search for professional service providers, with some success. Furthermore the matching algorithm uses simple keyword matching or standard service categories. This search results are inefficient, being either a very large set if the keyword or service is common or a very small set if the exact keyword was not used or that specific service was not tagged in the profile. The results may rank results based on how many keywords matched but this is not a measure of the truth of these keywords or of the matching. This limits the precision possible when a more bespoke service is required.
For example, the searcher might not know what keywords/categories truly represent their needs. Thus there may be many false positives or false negatives just because a different keyword was used or service was described. Also a service provider could list a large number of skills, services, and keywords in their profile to direct many searches towards themselves. There is no third party data to support or refute these. There is therefore a need for systems, databases and methods to provide a better search engine with stronger signals to the users about the other service providers.